For this day, Amazon waited for a full 4 years.
At the end of February 2022, Amazon finally completed the "unmanned" transformation of a Whole Foods whole foods supermarket in Washington, D.C., allowing it to welcome customers with a new look.
Customers can log in to their Amazon account with their mobile phones or their own "palm prints" at the entrance of the supermarket, enter the supermarket, purchase goods, and then leave directly. In the process, Amazon's "Just Walk Out" system will automatically track and identify the products purchased by customers, and complete the checkout deduction in the background to achieve "no sense of payment".
This unmanned retail system, in fact, as early as 2016, has completed the initial development. In January 2018, Amazon opened its first physical store in Seattle that focused on the concept of "unmanned retail", Amazon Go. At the beginning of the launch, Amazon was ambitious, claiming to open 3,000 unmanned retail stores in the United States within 4 years.
The 4-year period is up, and Amazon Go still has only 30 stores. It was also 4 years later that Amazon first deployed this technology in its Whole Foods supermarket, symbolizing this technology and taking a big step forward.
Domestic e-commerce giants, including Ali and JD.com, have also explored the technical direction of "unmanned retail", but they have quickly given up. To this day, Amazon is almost the only company in the world that still insists.
What is wrong with "unmanned retail"? It is far behind the planned development schedule, is there still a chance to accelerate?
Wonderful start
Unmanned retail technology originated from a very simple idea: if you go to the supermarket, you don't have to queue up to check out, it's fine.
Sounds like an impossible task. But with the development of various sensors, image recognition, and machine learning, Amazon has gradually gained the confidence to solve this problem.
In December 2016, Amazon announced amazon go unmanned retail stores for the first time, and began internal testing for internal employees.
To create a "checkout-free" shopping experience, Amazon has designed an extremely sophisticated sensing system to track customers and every item they buy.
First of all, on the ceiling of the Amazon Go store, the cloth has a dense camera to track the customer's location and identify what goods the customer has taken; in addition, each product also has a built-in sensing tag that can be sensed by the shelf. Some shelves also have built-in weight-detecting sensors for cross-checking what items are being "taken away" or "put back."
When you go shopping on Amazon Go, customers only need to scan the QR code of their Amazon account when they enter, and then they can choose the goods as they want, and the things they don't want can be put back on the shelves at any time. Everything will be silently recorded by the system, and after the purchase is completed, you can just leave.
A Whole Foods supermarket in Washington, D.C., has multiple cameras hanging from its ceiling| Whole Foods
In January 2018, Amazon opened its first public Amazon Go retail store in Seattle. Almost as a sensation in the early days of the opening, curious customers, tech enthusiasts, And YouTube bloggers flocked to "Explore the Store", almost all of them amazed at the magic of the system and marveled at the convenience of the experience.
Amazon also doubled its confidence and proposed internally a plan to open 3,000 Amazon Go unmanned retail stores across the United States. Although Bloomberg asked Amazon for confirmation of the news, Amazon did not comment.
Even so, the market is still full of confidence in the future of "unmanned retail". In addition, in 2017, Amazon just acquired Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket that focuses on organic food, and many people in the industry believe that Amazon will transform Whole Foods into a futuristic "next-generation unmanned supermarket".
And "no checkout and walk away" technology isn't just available to Amazon itself. In order to solve the needs of its own e-commerce business, Amazon built its own server system. After achieving technological leadership, the service was provided to other enterprises, and gradually evolved into an AWS cloud computing service.
In the same way, once Amazon's unmanned retail technology becomes the technical benchmark of the retail industry, it can also be licensed to other retail companies to help them "unmanned" transformation of stores, with full potential to become a cash cow business like AWS.
Amazon seems to be on the eve of the next "outbreak", mastering the weapon of "dimensionality reduction" against the physical retail industry. At that time, a series of traditional retail giants, including Walmart, all fell in response to their stock prices.
Convenience and resistance
But things don't seem to be so simple, after the first wave of madness, the popularity of Amazon Go, like many "internet celebrity stores", plummeted.
Although compared with most retail stores, Amazon Go's performance is still good, higher than the average level of the US retail industry. But it didn't "redefine the supermarket," as many people expected.
The most critical issue is that the convenience of "no checkout and walking" may not be so important.
The first time you experience "go without checkout" is magical, but "checkout" is ultimately a less critical part of the supermarket shopping process. After the enthusiasm, Amazon Go is still just a normal grocery store.
Moreover, many customers are uncomfortable with the "sense of surveillance" brought about by the large number of cameras in unmanned supermarkets. Previously, according to Business Insider, Amazon is already monitoring the work efficiency of cashiers and tally workers at Whole Foods through cameras, putting pressure on relatively inefficient employees to "work harder." Similar systems have also been deployed in Amazon's e-commerce warehouses, which has caused a lot of social controversy.
From the first day amazon go opened, skepticism has been around about Amazon using the system to "monitor customers." Although Amazon claims to the outside world that it will strictly protect the personal information recorded by customers in unmanned supermarkets, it will not use this information to conduct "behavior analysis" on users and optimize advertising push. But this does not completely solve the problem of "trust".
This is also a big reason why Amazon waited for 4 years to finally test this technology at Whole Foods. Amazon Go is a brand new brand that focused on "unmanned retail" on the first day of operation, and customers are willing to accept this technology. But Whole Foods is different, before it was acquired, it has a history of nearly 40 years, has its own fixed customer base, and there must be opponents of "unmanned retail" technology.
Therefore, after the completion of the renovation of the new store, Amazon provides users with the option of "no checkout", users can enter the store without logging in to their Amazon account, and self-scan the bar code to check out after purchasing goods. But anyway, the camera is there.
Whole Foods Supermarket has a free checkout channel | Whole Foods Supermarket
Moreover, the "no checkout and go" technology is not cheap. Upfront development costs aside, Amazon invested $4 million in its first Amazon Go retail store, or 40 percent of its total pre-opening operating costs, to realize this amazing technology.
Amazon has not disclosed the hardware technical details of Amazon Go, but based on the naked eye observation of customers, the ceiling of the entire store is covered with dense cameras, coupled with the sensors built into the shelves, they are bound to be expensive, and the follow-up needs long-term management and maintenance.
With "go without checkout" technology, Amazon offers a vision of "extreme convenience," but it also creates additional "resistance."
It's not that simple to revolutionize a traditional industry with hundreds or thousands of years of history.
The future of techno-ism
In 2018, when Amazon Go was just made public, there was also a wave of "unmanned retail" in China, including hema and JD.com, as well as a series of entrepreneurial projects, all of which had tried in this direction, but soon all stopped.
In the United States, not only "unmanned retail", Amazon's entire "physical retail strategy" has not developed smoothly. According to CNBC, Amazon is closing its 4-Star Shop, Amazon Bookstore, and pop-up stores. These stores are a series of previous attempts by Amazon to enter brick-and-mortar retail.
Amazon responded that it will not "retire" from the physical retail field, and will focus more on Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Fashion, Whole Foods Supermarket, and "no checkout" technology in the future. However, the development speed of these physical stores is not as fast as imagined, and the topic degree is gradually receding.
Just a few years after the popularity of Amazon Go faded, another "net red supermarket" rose in the United States. The supermarket is called Trader Joe's, and you can think of it as an "antonym" for Amazon.
Trader Joe's doesn't have any "tech sense," it doesn't have an online store, it doesn't have an app, it doesn't have a membership system, and it doesn't have promotions. It focuses on "retailing with people", with a special focus on cultivating the "caring spirit" of employees, and at checkout, Trader Joe's cashier will ask customers about their recent situation and solve their problems.
In terms of store décor, Trader Joe's is also very "retro". It will use wooden style shelves, warmer lights, hand-painted style goods, price tags. In short, everything is separated from the "cold sense of technology".
Finally, Trader Joe's items are very cheap. It cuts most SKUs, reducing costs by managing fewer goods, reducing middleware.
It can be said that Trader Joe's is a representative of an "anti-tech spirit", opposing everything about Amazon and emphasizing "having a human touch". But it is such a supermarket, in the past few years, has become one of the highest retail enterprises in the United States, equivalent to twice that of Whole Foods supermarket and Walmart.
The Whole Foods supermarket, which has undergone "unmanned" transformation, is moving away from this "human touch". In the remodeled Whole Foods supermarket, there are no longer clerks to help customers slice the whole bread, but instead a self-service bread slicer with a warning of "sharp blades, pay attention to safety".
Trader Joe's supermarket corner | commoncial appeal
This is the biggest problem with Amazon, and even the entire "unmanned retail" industry. These companies want to use the spirit of techno-ism to transform the retail industry, reduce manpower requirements and improve efficiency. However, the retail industry is still largely a "service industry", a part of social activities that requires the participation of "people".
In this case, the simple pursuit of the concept of "unmanned retail" itself may be "the wrong direction". To some extent, we must abandon the crude idea of "using technology to sweep away all problems" and consider more details with a more dimensional perspective.
For Amazon, no matter how many concept stores like Amazon Go are, they can't touch on the real "people-related" issues. Only by embarking on a historic supermarket like Whole Foods can it meet the more grounded problems, seek solutions, and try to integrate technology into life.
Today, when the term "new retail" is no longer hot and Amazon is beginning to enter the deep waters of retail, it may be the beginning of a bigger transformation.